


bad 2ymmetry

by Anonymous



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-04
Updated: 2013-02-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:40:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22077094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Sollux asks Karkat for a favor. Karkat makes a questionable medical decision involving cosmetic dental work.(A weird dumb little AU where Sollux is fighting in a resistance movement and Karkat is a field medic.)
Relationships: Sollux Captor & Karkat Vantas
Kudos: 2
Collections: Anonymous





	bad 2ymmetry

You knew something was going to happen to Sollux eventually.

You had hoped you’d be a little more prepared when it happened, but you’d always known that realistically you would have no idea how to deal with anything that might happen to him out there. You are no more a medic than the group you work for, a gaggle of fifty-odd lowbloods waging minor acts of sabotage and occasional murder against the Empire, is a resistance movement, but that’s what they call you. 

“Medic” is a very generous term that implies some degree of training or specialization that you do not have. Most of your “training” has consisted of reading stuff on Troll WebMD and looking up how to sew shut various types of wounds. You do your best to try to patch up trolls who get hurt with your limited experience, but serious injuries do happen, and when that happens, well...you do the best you can. You’re most commonly called upon for treating burns sustained by trolls working in the searing sunlight, but you’ve also seen some of your companions get seriously fucked up. You’ve seen what happens to trolls who get between the Empire and what it wants, and it’s not pretty.

You suppose you should be grateful Sollux wasn’t one of them.

* * *

Your current encampment is in a stretch of rocky land in the wake of a mountain, a desolate area that stretches for miles without a hive or any other trollmade structure to be seen. This zone was formerly important Imperial airspace, major enough that settlement in the area was banned by the Empire for military security purposes. Now politics have shifted, the area is no longer strategically important, and it's been relegated to a minor outpost that sees maybe a few ships a perigee. Now the cargo passing through is of minor importance and security has been downsized, which is why it's been chosen as the target for this mission.

The group is out here to collect information. You've received intelligence that an Imperial supply ship recently crashed while coming in for a landing, far enough away from the Imperial base that you have a chance of getting to it before their official Retrieval and Salvage team comes in.

Sollux was sent out with the team a few hours ago. Sollux almost never sees even the kind of small-scale combat your group engages in, mostly staying at camp doing computer work: collecting information, sabotaging whatever he can break into on the Imperial side of things, stuff like that. But today he's been sent out with the team to see what information he can recover from the ship's computers, which are supposed to have some information about the location of some important Imperial bases.

You’re not sure what happens while they’re out there. All you know is that about an hour or two after they leave, you are notified that you have incoming wounded.

When you hear it, you know has to be Sollux’s group. They’re the only ones out in the field today. 

All you can do is set up the tent in preparation for “moderate injuries”, as the alert unhelpfully tells you, and hope that Sollux isn’t one of them. 

About half an hour later, the wounded start to arrive.

There’s one other medic here, a yellowblood. She’s in another tent now, dealing with her share of the injured, and you’re on your own. This is the part of your job where the sick feeling of helpless incompetence always sets in. You don’t know what you’re doing. You were just assigned here to be kept out of the way, you’re pretty sure. Even here among lowbloods, people are wary of your status as a mutant. Their blood color means a life of oppression, but yours is a death sentence, and you get the feeling the most of the trolls here other than Sollux and Aradia are a little uncomfortable around a marked troll like you. As a result, you’ve been shoved off into the medical tent where you’ll be mostly out of sight. You’re reminded of this often when you find yourself standing in front of a bleeding troll, trying to focus on actually doing your job instead of thinking about how much you don’t know how to do this job.

Today you’re not thinking about that, though. Today though you’re just worried about Sollux.

As you tend to the injured—some head wounds and lacerations, but nothing life-threatening—you glance around the tent, scanning for Sollux. He doesn’t seem to be on any of the cots in here. Maybe he’s in the other tent?

Maybe he’s still at the scene of whatever happened, body abandoned on site. They don’t bring the dead back to camp. No use in a thing like that.

You try not to think about that. You’ve got other patients here who need you. Besides, they usually let you know in the alert if there are casualties.

Usually. Then again, sometimes they don’t. 

As you’re finishing up with one of the lower-priority patients, a surly rustblood with what you think is a fractured arm, the tent door opens and you hear the voice of Sollux’s squad leader.

“Hey, Vantas,” she says, “we got a straggler here.”

The figure slumped against her shoulder is Sollux. Christ, you’ve never been so happy to see him bleeding.

His glasses are missing and the right side of his face is a bloody mess, although as you look closer you see that there isn’t any major facial disfigurement, there’s just a lot of blood that seems to be coming from his mouth. You’re not sure if this is better or worse than your original assumption that he was bleeding heavily from the face. His forehead is kind of banged up as well, although it seems to have stopped bleeding at this point. There’s a mess of dried yellow blood all down the side of his face that looks pretty nasty, but at first glance he doesn’t appear to be dying, so that’s encouraging.

“Sollux?” you say. He groans, but it sounds more pissed off than in pain, so you think it can’t be too serious. “Hey,” you say. “What happened?”

He turns his head towards you slowly, like he’s struggling to coordinate the movement, and tries to sit up. “We...set off some kind of explosive in the ship by accident. Or that’s what everyone else was saying. I...don’t really remember what happened.” He lays his head back down. “Volyat says I hit my head.”

“You don’t remember what happened?” Okay, that’s a little worrying. You notice that one of his teeth has been knocked out, one of the bigger two in the abnormal set of twin canines that has given him a lisp his whole life. 

“No. Not really. I…” He trails off, frowns, then tries to start again. “I…” 

You start to work at cleaning the blood off his forehead wound. Sollux, barely seeming to notice this, continues to try to speak.

“There was...on the ship.” His speech is slow and comes out slurred. “It was near the helmsblock...and I saw...I thought I saw...something in there. Someone in there. I don’t know.”

He blinks slowly.

“KK, my chest hurts.”

The cut on his forehead isn’t so bad once you clean off all the blood accumulated around it, and you press a bandage onto it. You’re trying to keep yourself in medic mode, not worried friend mode, and pass over whatever this helmsblock stuff is for the moment, since you assume it’s not medically relevant. “Okay, your chest. Does it hurt to breathe?”

“Yeah,” he says.

Sollux doesn’t talk much after that. You go through the flowchart you’ve cobbled together from internet information that helps you make a guess at how serious a chest injury is, then go through the similar one you have for head injuries. Sollux answers your questions, but he’s stopped being chatty, and gives you short answers that he seems to be struggling to maintain focus on. It makes you very uneasy, but you think that whatever’s wrong with him isn’t going to kill him in the next few hours, so you leave him alone while you do another round around the tent checking on the other patients.

It takes you longer than anticipated; you end up having to pop into the other medic’s tent to help her restrain an uncooperative patient who doesn’t like needles. When you finally make it back around to Sollux, it’s a few hours later, and he seems to be doing somewhat better.

“Hey,” you say. “How’re you doing?” 

He’s sitting up, but not really looking at you. “KK,” he starts.

“Yeah?” You lean in, worried he’s going to tell you that he’s suffering terrible internal bleeding and you missed it like a dunce, and left him here in his hour of need, and now he’s dying. Instead he says, “That ship.”

You’re not really sure what the hell this has to do with anything, but you try to follow. “What about it?”

“Karkat, you know…when a ship crashes like that, the crew can evacuate, but the helmsman’s...you know. Stuck in there.”

You do know what happens to a helmsman. It’s something you imagine Sollux must have thought about a lot.

“We were just outside the control room when everything went to shit. And I...I thought I saw someone in the helmsblock.” With his pupilless eyes, you can’t tell if he’s looking at you or somewhere else off in the distance. “Maybe still in there. Maybe still alive.”

You can’t tell what he’s thinking. Regret? Fear? There are a lot of thoughts you can’t guess at that might be swimming around in his bumped-up head, but there’s one that you can guess at pretty well, because you’re thinking it too: in another world, one only a little different from this one, that could have been him.

You don't know what to say, so you just tell him, somewhat more brusquely than you mean to, “You know that there’s nothing that could have been done. Even if there was someone in there.”

He doesn’t say anything to that.

Suddenly desperate to escape this conversation, you mumble something about being needed in the other tent and make your exit. Sollux doesn’t call anything after you, as you kind of expect him to. You feel bad leaving him alone with the image of the helmsman, but you feel too small and insufficient to chase it away.

* * *

You determine that Sollux has a concussion and a couple bruised ribs, and on your orders he is confined to his tent for an indefinite amount of time to recover. You tell him he’s on cognitive rest, which means no computer work and certainly no psionics. He is super pissed about this, but there’s not much he can do, and he seems pretty tired a lot of the time anyway.

It helps that Aradia backs you up. She stays with him in his tent to keep an eye on him and refuses to let him overexert himself. You appreciate this. Your primary concern is medical, hers moirail, but the core of it is the same: you both know Sollux will snap his own skinny bones trying to throw himself out there again as soon as he can walk, and there has to be someone there to stop him. Sollux will destroy himself if he’s given the chance. It’s not out of any actively self-destructive urge, but just because of the way he throws his whole self at every problem without any regard for the damage to himself. His own body is collateral damage as far as he’s concerned, and in the condition he’s in you’re worried that the damage he’ll do to himself will be permanent this time. 

Even in the best of conditions, which is to say when he hasn’t had the shit concussed out of him, Sollux is not a fighter. He is built small and thin and easily breakable, and is almost never involved in any kind of physical engagement. He runs the tech stuff for the operation and is occasionally called in for psionics work, but never anything heavy.

But you and Aradia both worry about him, sitting there in his tent all the time. Sollux gets restless without things to do, some kind of problem to throw himself at headfirst. He needs something for his powerhouse of a brain to be occupied with or else it will turn in on itself. It’s part of why you’re so insistent on keeping him in bed. If you let him up before he’s healed completely, you know he’ll hurt himself just by the sheer force with which he throws himself at any task he’s faced with. You can tell him he’s in no condition to work all you want, but you know he’s far too stubborn to let a thing like his health stop him. Sollux is a machine built for war, and if his body doesn’t look like it’s made for that, that’s just because it wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the world if it was.

Something has to give. Sollux isn’t meant to sit still. He’ll find something to get him out of that tent.

So it’s not too much of a surprise when Sollux shows up in the medical tent a few days later.

* * *

You’re taking inventory for the next supply run. This means going through your stockroom (which is a corner of the tent sectioned off by some curtains) and making a list of what you need more of, and then the supply runners may or may not bring it to you on their next trip.

You’re low on burn dressings. Need more syringes. More iodine, more disinfectant wipes. You’re going to need a goddamn mile of gauze. Someone has taken your nice pair of bandage scissors, apparently unable to find their own pair of regular ones. You’re composing the verbal smackdown you’re going to lay on the thief as soon as you figure out who it is when you hear Sollux’s voice calling to you from the front of the tent. 

“Karkat?”

You stick your head out from the partitioned-off supply area. “Hey,” you say. “You’re not supposed to be up.”

He doesn’t say anything to that, which is what gets you worried. You cross to where he’s standing and take a look at him. 

“Hey, uh, you okay?” you say.

“I need you to take my tooth out,” he says.

You stare at him. “What?”

“My tooth. The other one, that didn’t get knocked out.” He curls his lip and points to his remaining big canine. “I need it out.”

Now that he’s closer, you can see the tension in his jaw and his shoulders. He’s high-strung, clearly agitated. You’ve seen him like this before a few times; he gets into…sort of a state sometimes.

“Is there…something wrong with it?” you ask him.

He sort of fidgets nervously. It’s odd to see him without his glasses. His hand keeps going to the bridge of his nose where they would normally sit and then sort of hovering there for a moment when he realizes there’s nothing there to adjust. A replacement pair is going to be difficult to come by out here, you think—he’ll be crabby about that for weeks.

“No. I mean, not really,” he says finally. “It’s just...not symmetrical.”

“What?”

He fidgets with his fingers. “My mouth’s not the same on both sides anymore. It feels off. I need it to be symmetrical again.”

You stare at him. “So you want me to pull your tooth out.”

He shrugs a little. “Yeah.”

You sigh and rub your temple. “I...I don’t understand. You’ve got plenty of stuff on you that’s not symmetrical. Your shoes aren’t, your glasses aren’t—what’s different about this?” You know that Sollux gets these things sometimes, he gets hung up on these things that don’t make sense, but hell if he isn’t going to be stubborn about them.

As expected, he does not fold in the face of your superior logic. “This is different,” he says. “It’s—it’s the shape of it. It’s off-balance. I just need it out.”

“Look,” you say, “I’m not taking your tooth out if there’s nothing wrong with it. You’ve already got one site just ripe for potential infections with that one you’ve already lost, and you want me to pull out another one and open up a whole new opportunity for bacteria to just go pouring into your bloodstream? You realize you’re basically doubling your chances of getting an infection here.”

Whatever fog has been induced over Sollux by head injury and personal distress appears to clear for a moment, and he cracks a tiny smile at you. “Double, you say?”

You sigh and squeeze the bridge of your nose. “Unbelievable. You are fucking impossible. I’m trying to tell you why you shouldn’t be tearing new holes in your squawk blister for the sake of your weird symmetry shtick and the only thing you can think about is your second, even stupider gimmick?”

He’s smiling again. “Yeah,” he says, “basically.”

You cross your arms. “You’ve got your pan all banged up and it’s making you weird. You’re not thinking straight. Go back to your tent.”

Sollux snorts. “I think my pan was pretty fucked up before this whole incident, KK. Of course I’m not thinking straight. I’ve never thought straight in my life. Are you gonna take it out or what?” 

“Seriously, I can’t do this, it is medically inadvisable,” you tell him. “Besides, we can’t spare any anesthetic. We’ve got a limited supply and I need to save it for emergencies.”

“It’s fine. I don’t need it. It’ll just hurt the same as the other one did.” 

A troll your age, well into young adulthood, is accustomed to much worse than the kind of pain from pulling out a single tooth. Even Sollux, who is not particularly tough or familiar with frequent physical injuries, can handle something like this. Your organization would be considered soft-hearted pansies for using anesthetics. The Imperial Alternian Army only uses anesthesia in procedures in which the troll must be restrained for the safety of the general crew.

Still, it’s not easy or fun to get a tooth pulled out. Or to be the one doing the pulling.

“Come on, all this stuff is just pretend anyway,” says Sollux. “All this like, diagnosis stuff, pretending you know what’s wrong with me, acting like you have some kind of medical protocol to follow. You’re not even a real doctor. You don’t know any more than I do, you just happen to be the guy they put in the medical tent.”

Okay, _that_ gets to you. You know a _little_ bit more than Sollux does, because you’ve read about it on the internet to keep yourself from looking like an idiot in front of your patients. You sputter while you start to work your way up to a riposte, but Sollux continues. 

“KK, look, if you’re not going to do it, I’ll just do it myself.”

You have no doubt that if you turn him away, Sollux will absolutely go back to his tent and attempt to yank it out himself. You’d like to at least be there if he’s going to do it. God knows what kind of damage he’d do trying to do it himself. As little confidence as you have in your medical abilities and so-called training, the thought of Sollux trying to pull his own tooth out makes something puff up in you that says that _you’re_ the medic and if this kind of thing is going to happen then _you’re_ the one who should be doing it. 

This is not a good way to deal with this, you know. If you were a better friend, you wouldn’t do it. You would tell him something and it would be the right thing to say and it would stop making him want to pull out bits of his own body, and things would be fine.

But you don’t know what to say. There’s nothing you can say to him that he doesn’t already know. You can’t talk him out of this itch. He knows as well as you do that it’s an illogical urge, and he’s going to go ahead with it anyway whether you’re with him or not.

You think of the helmsman on that ship, dead or dying. All things considered, there are things worse than having a tooth pulled.

“Okay,” you say, “I’ll do it.” 

Sollux looks at you “But only because you’re a stubborn piece of shit. Let me get some stuff.”

You go back to the supply area, partially to actually get supplies, but partially to have a moment to collect yourself with the benefit of the curtain between you and Sollux. You’ve never pulled a tooth before, but you figure it can’t be _too_ difficult. Just kinda...stick something in there and yank it out, right? It’s not like it’s pan surgery. This is fine, you tell yourself. This is totally cool, you can do this. 

You scan the shelf for something that looks like it could get a good grip on a tooth. There’s a box full of various types of forceps, all unhelpfully unlabeled. You select one that looks like it’s made for pulling something tooth-sized, if maybe not a tooth, and return to the cot.

Sollux is tapping his foot, still clearly somewhat agitated. You prop up the back of one of the cots so it’s in an upright position and indicate to Sollux that he should sit.

“Alright,” you say, “let’s do this.”

You run the forceps under the beam of the sterilizer. The machine is an old, rattly model scooped out of the waste compactor of an Imperial facility. You’re pretty sure all of the actual sterilizing components still work, although it’s not like you would have any way of telling if they didn’t. 

Sollux opens his mouth, and you tap on his left front canine. "This one?"

"Yeah," says Sollux, sounding stupid trying to talk around an open mouth. 

Standing above him and appraising the target tooth, you once again feel very out of your element. You felt the same way when you were first staring at him on that cot a few days ago, wiping the blood off his face. You’ve dealt with trolls who shriek and thrash and claw at you and trolls who go still and silent and try to hide the pain, and you’ve more or less learned how to handle both kinds, but you don’t know what to do with Sollux.

Well, nothing for it. You stick the forceps in his mouth.

Fuck, your hands are sweating. What if you slip up and end up knocking out a couple more perfectly good teeth? There are a million ways you could fuck it up, but you’ve made the movement to start now, so you try to pull yourself together and clamp around the tooth. It's kind of difficult—the tooth is oddly shaped and tapers down, and it's harder to get a good grip on it than you expected. You had kind of hoped you would just be able to grab it and yank it out, but apparently not.

You stick your other hand into Sollux's mouth and try to open his jaw farther to get some more room to maneuver. He makes a disgruntled noise, but allows your hand. You should really be wearing gloves. You are not wearing gloves, because you do not have any more. You do your best when it comes to medical hygiene, but it tends to not be a top priority on Alternia. You make a mental note to add gloves to the supply list when you're done, though, because this is kind of gross.

There. You find a spot where you can get a solid hold with some decent leverage. Just have to pull it now.

“Look,” you say, “are you really sure about this?”

“Fuck’s sake,” he says around the pliers, “just take it out.”

Well, alright. You try to yank it towards you. It doesn't move. You pull a little harder. Still nothing. 

You hadn't realized how well a healthy tooth is really rooted in there until now. You give it another couple tugs, and Sollux makes a frustrated noise under you. "Hurry up and get it _out_ ," he says around your hand.

"Sorry," you mutter, "I'm trying." You brace your free hand against his jaw and really _pull_ on the tooth with all of your strength.

There. You feel it move very slightly. Sollux makes sort of a cross between a whine and a gurgle, but you feel like now that you’ve loosened it you’ve really committed yourself to seeing this thing through, so you continue.

You give another good yank and begin to feel it wiggle at the root. On the side of his mouth that you don't have the forceps in, Sollux is biting into his tongue. Shit, this is taking longer than you had anticipated and he's clearly in pain. You need to get this over with fast.

You give it a few more twists to loosen it up, then brace against Sollux's jaw again and pull as hard as you can. 

Sollux gives a short bark of pain, and the tooth comes out. You stumble back a few steps from the force of it, lose your grip on the tooth, catch it in your other hand, and finally right yourself.

You stare at the bloody tooth in your palm and then at Sollux, who is beginning to relax his grip on the sides of the cot. 

"Okay," you say, "Done." 

You continue to look at Sollux, a little warily. He's coming down from the shock of the pain, but you think he looks better. You can see immediately that he doesn't have any of the agitated energy he had before. The slope of his shoulders is calmer, more settled than it was ten minutes ago, and he looks very calm for a troll who's just had a tooth yanked out of his head.

He runs his tongue over the new hole in his dentition, getting used to the feeling of not having anything there, then goes over it a second time, seeming to approve.

"Thanks," he says, the S hissing cleanly through the newly symmetrical gaps.

He blinks, looking surprised. "Ssssss," he says, "sssssss." He looks over at you, suddenly bright. "Hey, KK, look at that, I can say my S's now! Ssssss. Ssssollux. Sollux Captor.” He laughs. “That's me. Sollux."

You let him continue for a while, and then eventually make him shut up because he's spitting tiny flecks of blood everywhere every time he talks. He allows you to press a wad of gauze into his mouth and wipe some of the stray bloody spittle off of his chin.

You look down at the tooth, which you’ve been holding in your left hand since catching it for lack of a proper place to put it. You hold it out to Sollux. “You, uh...you wanna keep this?” you ask. 

“Nah, you can have it,” he says, still floating a little from whatever weird satisfaction being down a second tooth in a week has apparently brought him.

“Well,” you say, “happy fucking wriggling day to me.” You drop the tooth into a cup that’s sitting on the table by the cot (your condolences to whoever’s going to drink out of it next) and then send Sollux back to his tent.

* * *

Aradia is furious when she finds out what you did. You feel for her, you really do. It is miserable to feel that you have failed your moirail by letting them get hurt, and it's an extra-awful sting when they do it to themselves and you're not there to stop it.

You're not sure whether she's madder at Sollux for asking you or you for doing it. She’s definitely pretty mad at you. After she finds out what happened, she storms into your tent to confront you about it and you find yourself in the awkward position of having to try to justify yourself to her.

“He would have done himself anyway if I hadn’t done it,” you tell her. “I wanted the oversight of a medical specialist—“

“Karkat Vantas, you are not a medical specialist, you are a guy in a tent with some pliers. What did you think you were _doing_?

“They’re not pliers,” you mutter, more at the floor than at her, “I’m a medic, not a fucking mechaniclobberer.”

You wish Sollux was here to defend you, or explain your actions, or at least take some of the blame, but he has neglected to come along to this reprimand session hosted by his moirail. He does show up at your tent again a few hours later, though.

“You’re interrupting my important life-saving work,” you call over when you recognize it’s him at the door. (You are doing precisely jack shit. There is nothing going on.)

“Well damn, alright,” says Sollux. “I was going to say thank you, but I guess you’re too busy to hear it.”

You turn towards him. “…I will pause in my tireless and selfless labors for a moment to say you’re welcome.”

Sollux’s lips hook oddly around the two new gaps in his smile. “Okay, great,” he says. “Then we’re done. This transaction is finished.”  
You snort. “Oh, you think the transaction is finished? We’re even? I pull a damn tooth out of your head and you just have to duck in here and say thanks and those things are equivalent?”

“Okay, well, fine,” says Sollux. “If you ever want a tooth pulled in return I will do that for you.”

“You know what, I will generously forgive the debt.”

Sollux plants himself in the tent and you keep needling each other until the captain comes around and tells you to keep it down. Both of you grumble at her, and then at each other for being the cause of the nuisance, but secretly you think to yourself that you are glad to have Sollux here, alive and in one piece. Minus a chunk or two.


End file.
